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In a recent news article the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has introduced a technology for automatically remembering connections between objects. The provided system determines how objects in a large software project interact, so it can inform latecomers which objects they will need to design certain types of functions.

The privately owned US company Coverity claims that its newly released and browser-based software tool Coverity Integrity Control supports development organizations to set standard policies for code quality and security, and then manage, monitor and report on these policies as code is tested.

ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy that focuses on agile development, recently announced they will leverage the software architecture management tool Structure101 for assessing the quality of code bases. Structure101 is the main product that Headway Software provides for advanced code analysis.

The latest version of open source code quality management tool Sonar supports architecture constraint rules and custom dashboards. SonarSource team recently released Sonar 2.4 version which also includes Maven 3 support and an update center to install and upgrade Sonar plugins.

Multiple reasons can be quoted for the failure of software projects. Some projects fail because of bad requirements, others due to cost and schedule overrun and few simply due to bad management. If we do a root cause analysis, would all of the failed projects lead to bad code as the main culprit? Always?

For .NET developers who want the rigor of code analysis without the expense of Visual Studio Premium, FXCop is the tool for choice. But with FXCop 1.36 pulled from Microsoft Downloads without warning, many developers were left wondering what happened. Fortunately this tool is still available if you know where to look.

Microsoft’s .NET code analysis tool, FXCop, has offered the ability to create custom code analysis rules for many years, but the experience has been less than stellar. The version for VS 2010 offers some improvements and a better integration story, but some fundamental problems still remain.

There is code which is well tested, well re-factored and built to last. There is also code which is planned to be thrown away in a few days. Between these two extremes, there is a lot of gray area. The code in this gray area is written with the presumption that it would be cleaned up later but is never done.

NDepend 3.0 comes integrated with Visual Studio analyzing code in real time, can analyze code over multiple VS solutions, supports editing of multiple CQL rules at one time, and comes with enhanced search and performance.

Code Contracts are making slow progress towards being ready for production use. While the technology still shows a lot of initial promise, it doesn’t take long to run into a road block or six that makes them unusable in their current form.

Bill Pugh has released FindBugs 1.3.9, the latest update to the popular Java static analysis tool. The latest release adds 12 new bug detectors and continues to work on improving the effectiveness of FindBugs as a tool for developers working with large code bases, a trend which will continue with the 2.0 release expected later this year.

Code quality tools for mainstream languages have reached a certain level of maturity, but tools for Ruby are still growing and become more important as Ruby spreads from early adopters to the early majority. InfoQ takes a look at the available code quality tools in the Ruby space.